


The Wrong Window

by Thetruehamsolo



Series: Johnlock One-Shots [4]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, AU, Alternative First Meeting, Boom box, Drunk John, M/M, Pining, Sad Gay Sherlock, Tumblr Prompt, Unilock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-02-19
Packaged: 2018-05-21 22:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6060712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thetruehamsolo/pseuds/Thetruehamsolo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt from Tumblr – Person A tries to serenade their ex but ends up at Person B’s house by mistake</p><p>Or, the five times John wasn’t at 221 Baker Street to see Sherlock and the one time he was.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Wrong Window

**Author's Note:**

> So, it's been well over a year since I posted anything, and I saw this prompt on tumblr and I was only going to write a little piece and then suddenly it was 4k words and well, you know.  
> I hope you enjoy it!

## The Wrong Window

* * *

 

**1**

It was two am and Friday was melting into Saturday. Sherlock was typing, fingers flying over the keys, barely paying attention to the words he was putting on the page, eyes fixed on the word counter in the corner of his screen as it went steadily up and up. He’d spell check the document in the morning. This was the last time he’d stay up for three days in a row just to spite Mycroft.

There was a crash, and Sherlock bolted upright, suddenly wide awake. He looked around but nothing in his flat seemed to have made the noise. The blender in the kitchen was still upright-ish (leaning precariously against the fridge), the microscope was still in the Spot of Perfect Light (at a forty-five degree angle to the window) and the violin was still perched where Mrs Hudson couldn’t detune it while cleaning (at the top of a rather large pile of chemistry textbooks). Everything was in order – not that anyone else would have called it order. (Sherlock didn’t exactly care what they thought. Idiots.)

There was another crash and, now that Sherlock was listening for it, he realised it was coming from outside. He peered, somewhat nervously, around the heavy curtains of the nearest window. (Which was ridiculous – he caught criminals as a hobby but he was scared of a cat knocking over a few bins?)

It wasn’t a cat. There was an overturned bin, which was probably what had caused the first crash, but the second had come from a very drunk fist hitting against Sherlock’s front door. It was obvious to Sherlock that its owner was quite drunk – the staggering, the slurred swearing, the knocking on strangers’ doors – it didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure that out. Sherlock imagined even Anderson could have done it.

Ok, maybe that was giving Anderson too much credit.

The stranger knocked on the door again – fell against it, really – and Sherlock knew he had to make him leave now before he woke up the whole street – or worse: Mrs Hudson. He hurried down the stairs, missing the creaking one – though, he realised afterwards, if anyone wasn’t already awake because of the drunk stranger, they were hardly going to wake up now.

He opened the front door right as the stranger was flinging himself against it one more time and they both went crashing to the floor.

The stranger had seemingly not noticed that they were on the floor – or he didn’t realise that this was an odd position for utter strangers to be in. He studied Sherlock’s face with probably all the concentration his little drunk brain could muster. “Who the f-*hic* are you?”

“You walked here and knocked on my door and now you’re asking me who I am?” Sherlock didn’t understand – and that was saying something.

The stranger was getting up, badly. “Where is she?” He slurred, trying (and failing) to climb the stairs.

Sherlock shook his head at the audacity of this man. He pulled him away from the stairs (it took considerable force, the man was well-built – rugby, probably). “She’s not here. You’re at the wrong house. Leave.” He said, shoving him towards the door.

The man turned around. “You hit your head. Is your head ok? I'm a doctor soon. Yes. A soon-*hic*-doctor. I can take an exam on your head to see for the concussion possible.”

“Not a chance.” Sherlock said, trying not to roll his eyes. “I'm fine. And you’re drunk.”

The soon-doctor shook his head. “’M not drunk. You’re *hic* lying.”

Sherlock really did roll his eyes. “Leave me alone.” He summoned all his strength and shoved the soon-doctor out the door, slamming it behind him. He stormed back up the stairs and sat down in front of his computer. The words on the screen blurred together and he closed the lid.

“I need to get some sleep.” He said to no one in particular.

* * *

 

**2**

Sherlock had all but forgotten about the drunken stranger he’d encountered outside his flat. In the two weeks since the incident, he’d been too busy to think about soon-doctors – there were murders to solve and alibis to disprove and far more interesting things to do than contemplate the stranger that had stumbled across his threshold in the dead of night and caused such a bloody ruckus.

It was a Thursday evening when he could finally slow down. The case had been a taxing one – the death toll had risen almost faster than the police could keep up with their paperwork.

Sherlock ate his first meal in four days, took a long hot bubble bath, and went to bed. And lay in bed. He stared at the white ceiling above his head and waited. But sleep refused to come to him.

After nearly an hour of tossing and turning and moving and shuffling, Sherlock got up and trudged back into the sitting room. He was about to see if the couch would finally let him get some shut-eye when a noise startled him from the ground outside the flat. (Oh, God, not again.) He peered cautiously out the nearest window, simultaneously hoping and fearing that it was the soon-doctor from two weeks before, though he wasn’t quite sure why he wanted it to be.

It was. He wasn’t even drunk this time. He was standing outside Sherlock Holmes’ windows, holding a boom box (where did he even _get_ a boom box? Sherlock hadn’t seen one since the early 1990s.) that was playing some sort of pop song. Sherlock flung the window open and yelled at him.

“I don’t know why you think your ex-girlfriend is living here, but she’s not. Now, kindly fuck off!”

The man frowned up at him. “Why wouldn't she be here?”

“This is 221B Baker Street. I've been living here for over a year now. This is not where your ex lives, or has lived, or used to live.”

“How do you know I'm looking for my ex?”

“You were here two weeks ago, drunk off your head, demanding to see a woman. Now, you’re back, with what I can only assume is a pop culture reference because you can’t, in all seriousness, own a boom box in the twenty first century. The only conclusion that I can draw is that you’re mistaking this flat for where your ex-girlfriend lives. She didn’t two weeks ago and she doesn’t now. Just go away!”

The soon-doctor nodded. “Yeah. Fine. Sorry for disturbing you, mate.” He turned off the awful music and walked away, shoulders drooping.

Sherlock wasn’t entirely sure why he watched him leave. He hardly cared about the man, or his rather awful excuse for a love life. A boom box in this day and age. What was he thinking?

After he’d turned the corner and disappeared, Sherlock closed the window and slumped onto the couch. Even with his head on one headrest, his feet stuck precariously off the other end. The room seemed colder than he remembered. He shivered.

Defeated, he sulked back into his bedroom and curled up under the covers. Eventually, he fell asleep.

* * *

 

**3**

Sherlock’s downstairs neighbour, the one who lived in the basement flat below Mrs Hudson’s, was a young man called Mike Stamford. He was in his second year of uni, studying medicine in Imperial College London, where Sherlock was studying chemistry, so Sherlock saw him a lot as they went to and from uni on the same tubes.

Sherlock knew that Mike was not the sharpest knife in the drawer, or the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, or the shiniest tool in the shed. He had once or twice deduced that Mike was being tutored by someone in the year ahead of the both of them, but he had never met the person. He didn’t care to, of course. Why any idiot thought they were qualified to teach material to bigger idiots than themselves was beyond Sherlock. Then again, that described most of Sherlock’s Professors and lecturers. He had made a deal with Mycroft that he’d get cases as long as he attended a certain number of classes a week – and didn’t get kicked out of any of them. That involved being as quiet as a mouse, and fighting every instinct he had to scoff when a professor opened their mouth.

He got home earlier than usual on that particular Tuesday because he’d had a headache that was too nagging to ignore – especially in McFionn’s class. His voice was high-pitched and grating and it hurt Sherlock’s ears even on his better days. Today was not one of his better days. He couldn’t think of a particular reason why, but he’d woken up out of sorts and nothing he’d done all day had fixed the problem.

He had only been inside for two minutes – his coat was still swinging from where he’d hung it up, and he was still in the hall flicking through the post, reading his latest phone bill that his brother had already paid – when there was a knock on the door. Sherlock frowned, not expecting anyone, especially not at this time of day; most people were at work, or school, or doing other tedious normal-people things. He opened the door and groaned at the familiar sight of one of the last people he wanted to see right then – not that he was particularly in the mood to converse with anyone.

“You again, I can’t believe–“

The soon-doctor interrupted him. “I'm actually here to see Mike. We’re meeting in his flat because my flatmate –“

“Spilled milk on your carpet and now your flat reeks, yes, whatever.” Sherlock was bored of this poor excuse for a conversation already. “Stamford’s in the basement. Knock before you go in – he is worryingly fond of wanking on the sofa.”

The doctor chuckled. “Noted.” There was a pause. “Sorry about last week, mate.” He said. “And that drunk night that I don’t even remember.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and headed up the stairs.

“Do I not even get your name? Don’t you think we’ve reached that point?”

Sherlock froze, one foot mid-air.

“I'm John.” The soon-doctor said. “John Watson.”

Sherlock couldn’t find his voice. He shook himself out of his stupor and continued up the stairs – not even acknowledging that the soon-doctor had spoken. Why on earth would this John want to know his name? He clearly didn’t want to know too badly, because Sherlock heard the basement door close behind John after only a short silence.

Sherlock curled up in his armchair and went into his Mind Palace, planning to delete John’s name – it was hardly vital information – only to find that John and his boom box and his loud drunken slurring had a room all of their own. Instead of deleting the room, Sherlock catalogued the sound of John’s chuckle, without quite knowing why.

* * *

 

**4**

It was raining cats and dogs and Sherlock was bored. Not literal cats and dogs either, or that would have been somewhat interesting. No. It was just boring old normal wet rain. Very few crimes happened in the rain. He pitied the criminal population of London; they were not afraid of murdering someone, but the second a drop of liquid water fell from the sky they all ran inside and gave up. With the amount of raining that went on in this country, he was surprised any of them got to do any murdering at all.

He was lying on the couch when the first knock came. He almost missed it the first time – he wasn’t expecting anyone – but then, he never really was.

There was another knock and Sherlock yelled down to Mrs Hudson to get the door. Maybe it was a client. It wouldn’t do for them to think that Sherlock had to open his own doors. They might pay him less – he didn’t care about the money, but apparently people liked to get it in exchange for food and services and, in Mrs Hudson’s case, his flat.

The knocking grew more frantic. Sherlock suddenly remembered that Stamford had classes and Mrs Hudson was having tea with Mrs Turner next door. He leapt up and bolted down the stairs, silk dressing gown flapping like a cape in the wind as he ran. His own stupidity could not lose him clients – the irony would be too great.

He flung open the front door with gusto and John Watson stumbled inside – Sherlock had to resist the urge to pinch himself. This had to be a dream, right? Why else would John Watson be here, soaking wet, clamouring to come inside?

“Speedy’s is closed.”

Well. That answered that. Sherlock felt like an idiot. He only watched as John shook himself like a dog and began to shiver.

“Would you close that bloody door? I'm sorry to barge in, but I really need tea and I'm wet and cold and – are you ok?”

“Sherlock Holmes.”

“Gesundheit.”

Sherlock glared at him.

“It sounds like you’re getting a cold too. You should close the door.” John was openly grinning now. He knew he was being a little shit and he seemed not to care.

Sherlock pushed the door closed, still glaring. The door swung shut, gradually slowing door until it stopped – an inch in front of the doorframe. Sherlock flushed bright red and firmly shut the door.

John snorted. “Well done, Lockie.”

Sherlock looked at him. “I thought you thought I was sneezing.”

“Mike told me your name last week. Or, well, you know, I asked. After I asked you and you sort of glitched on the stairs”

John was talking about him. He asked Mike about him. Sherlock felt himself blinking rapidly.

“Yeah, it looked exactly like that.”

Sherlock shook himself. “Sorry.” He felt like such a twat. “Why were you going to Speedy’s anyway? They’ve been closed for the past few days. Someone set fire to the toaster.” (Sherlock had set fire to the toaster.)

“How does one set fire to a toaster?”

“I don’t know how.” (Sherlock knew exactly how.)

“I was meeting – Well. It was a date, actually. I was going for coffee. With. You know. A girl.”

There was another girl already. Sherlock’s heart dropped into his feet. (Well, it really didn’t because he’d probably be dead – then again, maybe this was what dying felt like.) He forced himself to nod.

John didn’t see. He was looking at his feet.

“You asked for tea.” Sherlock said with a cough. “Put your coat on the radiator and follow me upstairs.”

John nodded and shrugged out of his dripping jacket. Sherlock tried not to stare. So he ran upstairs instead. He put the kettle on and tried to tidy the place up a bit before John arrived – which, frankly, was not long at all. He’d been only a few steps behind Sherlock, after all.

John didn’t seem to mind that there were books covering every square inch of available surface in the flat. He didn’t seem too disgusted by Sherlock’s experiments. He took his tea with a smile that warmed Sherlock more than tea ever could. Sherlock sat across from the soon-doctor and laughed where he was supposed to laugh and nodded encouragingly at the right places in his stories. He didn’t even mind that they stories were mundane and about idiots and that he himself wasn’t actually saying much at all.

Sherlock wished John never had to leave.

* * *

 

**5**

John was always at the back of Sherlock’s mind these days. No matter what he did, every time he closed his eyes, he saw John’s smile, with his one crooked tooth that Sherlock wanted to run his tongue along. Every time he made tea, he pictured the way John’s sturdy doctor-hands gripped his mug (and, if that was the only mug he’d used since then, that was just a coincidence) Every time he found himself in silence, he could hear John’s too-loud laugh echoing around his head.

So, when Sherlock came home on a Sunday afternoon, just over two weeks after he’d last seen John Watson, to that laugh coming from Mrs Hudson’s kitchen, he was more than a little confused.

It had been a bad week. He’d been solving a case with the Yard and he’d made a mistake, resulting in the death of a young police constable. To top it all, the murderer had got away and was already probably in Belarus, or somewhere like that, where the police couldn’t get him extradited.

He rapped once on the door and entered before he heard a response. He swung the door wide open and strode inside to see that Mrs Hudson and John Watson were chatting and laughing over tea. Sherlock felt more things in that moment that he thought he’d ever felt in his life.

Jealousy; John Watson belonged to Sherlock and he couldn’t just sit around having tea and laughing that wonderful laugh with anyone else. Sorrow; John Watson didn’t really belong to Sherlock and really could just sit around having tea and laughing with anyone else that he wanted. Contentment; John Watson was just sitting around and having tea and laughing with Mrs Hudson and not the silly girl that he’d missed that date with (Sherlock had never met her, but he was sure she was very silly). Joy; John Watson was just sitting around having tea and laughing in the place where Sherlock lived. Ecstasy; John Watson was looking at him and smiling that perfectly imperfect smile and suddenly it was like nothing bad had ever happened and none of it would ever matter again because John was here and Sherlock was getting dizzy – what was that thing that one had to do to stay alive? Breathing? God, was he forgetting to do that again?

Suddenly, John was by his side and helping him into a chair and handing him a glass of water and resting his perfect hand on his shoulder and he was saying something to Mrs Hudson but Sherlock couldn’t hear because he could smell John’s cologne and his aftershave and he was getting dizzy again and –

“Sherlock?” John’s voice broke through the fog. “Sherlock, are you ok?”

Sherlock nodded and grabbed the glass of water, downing it in one go.

“I'm fine.” He rasped. Somehow, even a whole glass of water was not enough to make his voice sound normal again. He cursed at himself – in his head (probably) – and coughed. Twice.

“I'm fine.” He said again, finally sounding a bit more like himself. “What are you –“ (No, that sounded rude) “Why –“ (That was just needy) “Uh.” (Eloquent, Sherlock. Well done.)

“I'm here to visit my great-aunt Martha, actually.” John said, reading his mind. (How was John so perfect?)

He really, _really_ , hoped John couldn’t actually read minds.

John sat down beside Sherlock, leaving his distracting hand on Sherlock’s shoulder. He set a plate down in front of Sherlock and piled a few of each type of biscuit on display onto it. Sherlock tried to complain, but his voice refused to work for him.

He slumped lower in defeat and picked up a custard cream, shoving it all into his mouth at once.

Mrs. Hudson stared. “How did you do that, John?”

“Do what?” John said.

“Get him to eat without making such a ruckus you’d swear you were trying to poison him.” Sherlock flushed, half-embarrassed, half-indignant, but his mouth was too full to protest.

John shrugged. “I didn’t know it was hard.”

Sherlock swallowed uncomfortably. If John kept touching his shoulder like that, soon it would be getting very hard indeed.

 

* * *

 

**+1**

Sherlock hadn’t seen John in five days and his heart was starting to hurt. He had lurked around the flat all day on Tuesday, just in case John showed up to tutor Stamford. He had set another ‘accidental’ fire in Speedy’s so John would knock on their door instead. He was very close to asking Mrs Hudson how often she met her great-nephew, but he was putting it off because he knew she’d look at him knowingly and tell him that he should ask John on a date – which he obviously couldn’t do because John dated girls and played rugby and had friends and Sherlock was just, well, Sherlock. Poor, lonely, smart-arse Sherlock. He didn’t want John to say yes because he pitied him, yet he knew that a pity-date was the only date he’d ever have with John Watson.

That brought Sherlock to where he was now, at home, alone, at six o’clock on a Friday evening, on his second glass of wine, looking through John’s four hundred Facebook pictures, and stopping at each and every one to stroke John’s pixelated face and glare daggers at the woman he was with. He wondered which one had been the girlfriend that had dumped John and led him to Sherlock’s door all those weeks ago, drunk, stumbling and shouting. Sherlock almost longed for that time – a simpler time before he’d known John Watson.

Sherlock’s heart leapt when there was a knock on the front door. He could almost fool himself into thinking that it was John. He wanted to run down the stairs, and open the door and hold John and never let him go, Mrs Hudson or Mike or whoever the hell he was there to see be damned. John was his.

John should be his.

He heard Mrs Hudson’s heels clack across the wooden floor and he heard the door creak open and he heard muffled voices from the hall – Mrs Hudson’s and a man’s – but try as he might, he couldn’t hear what they were saying. He heard the thump, thump, thump of feet on the stairs up to his flat. He wanted to yell and scream. He wasn’t in the mood for taking cases. He wasn’t in the mood for talking to anyone. He just wanted to shrivel up and die alone and –

There were two short knocks on the door. “Sherlock?”

He knew that voice.

Sherlock snapped his laptop shut before John could see what he was looking at. “John?”

A golden head peered round the door. “Can I come in?”

“Yes!” Sherlock cleared his throat. “I mean, yeah. Sure. Why not?”

John was beaming at him, like he found something hilarious. Maybe there was a bit of toothpaste on his chin. Oh, god. Why did this always happen to him?

“Mike should be in 221C and you saw Mrs Hudson when she let you in. Why are you – I mean. There’s nothing for you up here.”

John took one step inside. “You’re up here.”

Sherlock’s brain stuttered. “I. Yes. I am.”

John nodded and took one step closer. “You’re the cutest person in the building, by far.”

That was laughable. “But you’re in the building too.” Sherlock said.

John smiled wider. Sherlock was afraid his face might split in half. “I heard you don’t eat much.”

“Eating is unnecessary.”

“I'm going to be a doctor, and, I have to inform you, it’s not.” He was still coming closer, taking one step every time he spoke.

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Of course you’d say that. But I'm perfectly healthy the way I am.”

John nodded. He wasn’t smiling anymore. “Maybe, but I'm going to have to insist you have dinner tonight.”

Sherlock froze.

“With me.”

Sherlock stopped breathing.

“Like, on a date.”

John was a single arm-length away from Sherlock now. It was far too close and far too far away at the same time.

Sherlock didn’t know what to say. He nodded.

The corners of John’s lips were tugged upwards a little. “Good. If you’d said no, I'd have had to come back with the boom box and that would just have been embarrassing for everyone.”

Sherlock managed a weak smile. He couldn’t believe this was really happening. He tried to remember how to breathe.

“Will we go now?” John asked. “I actually have a reservation at a lovely little Italian place around the corner.”

“That sounds fantastic. Let me get my coat.”

“Actually, there is one more thing that I wanted to ask you first.” John said, as if suddenly remembering, grabbing Sherlock’s wrist to keep him from going too far away. (As if Sherlock ever wanted to be away from John.)

Before Sherlock’s mind could race with possibilities that would only freak him out again, John asked, almost shyly; “Can I kiss you?”

Sherlock nodded and felt John’s strong arms wind around him, one dangerously close to his arse, the other on his neck, and felt John’s breath on his cheek and then on his lips and then –

Well, Sherlock had always said breathing was boring anyway.

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
